Preface

Landau, Ellen G.

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Preface

Ellen G. Landau

Mexico and American Modernism

Mexico and American Modernism presents a related set of interdisciplinary cross-cultural case studies charting the impact of aesthetic connections to Mexico and Mexican art on four important mid-twentieth-century American artists. Major contributions by Isamu Noguchi, Philip Guston, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Motherwell were...

Author

Ellen G. Landau

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.vii-xi

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00082.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15280

Preface

Mexico and American Modernism presents a related set of interdisciplinary cross-cultural case studies charting the impact of aesthetic connections to Mexico and Mexican art on four important mid-twentieth-century American artists. Major contributions by Isamu Noguchi, Philip Guston, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Motherwell were sparked in decisive ways by their links to Mexican artistic achievements and, in three instances, to unique opportunities available south of the border. The little-known Mexican mural experiences of Guston and Noguchi both foreshadowed and nourished central tenets of their mature artistic production. For example, the curious turn to what we now term “identity politics” so evident in Guston’s late figurative style makes much more sense in light of the complex autobiographical narrative embedded in The Struggle Against Terrorism, the epic fresco he created in Morelia in 1934–35 with Reuben Kadish. Noguchi’s Mexico City project is often marginalized in accounts of his career. Yet its style and imagery drew closely upon his nascent association with famed choreographer Martha Graham, providing a foretaste of their successful twenty-two-year theatrical collaboration, while referencing simultaneously his sister’s parallel participation in radical leftist dance. Numerous analogues in organization, bodily metaphor, and polemical content connect the design and iconography of Noguchi’s History as Seen from Mexico, 1936 to the dialectic of Manhattan’s socialist dance troupes. Jackson Pollock had close encounters with the explosive work of Mexican muralists José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros in Los Angeles and New York (he actually knew Siqueiros well), and Robert Motherwell spent the second half of 1941 living first in Taxco and then in a Mexico City suburb, interacting respectively with Roberto Matta Echaurren and Wolfgang Paalen, expatriate Surrealists. A close reading of some of the most innovative early works by Pollock and Motherwell reveals critical thematic and technical dimensions unlikely without their having synthesized a Mexican impetus. Whereas French Surrealist founder André Breton saw Mexico and Mexican art somewhat reductively — he is presented here as a kind of foil to the Americans — these artists were catalyzed by its power, and they knew it.

Prior scholarship on Abstract Expressionism (the so-called “triumph of American painting” which developed in the early years of the second World War) has only scratched the surface in analyzing Mexican implications for U.S. creativity. Cross-fertilization with the extraordinary flowering of Mexican art that took place in the early twentieth century and the broadening effect of its tumultuous social circumstance continued to open new avenues for North American achievement well into the 1940s. Sharpened and refined interrogation of this phenomenon can add new perspective on the cultural impact of globalization, a key twenty-first-century directive of humanistic studies. One aim of this book is to complicate the primarily Eurocentric context within which U.S. goals and accomplishments in the visual arts are so often framed and to expose, in four key instances, alternate parameters of a modernist dialogue rooted in Western Hemisphere hybridity. For the artists in this study, admiring and accepting Mexican impetus led to corollary immersion with a much wider range of contexts — in addition to radical dance, philosophy, rhetoric, psychology, politics, and religious history, for example.

Each of the first four chapters of Mexico and American Modernism revolves around one central character. Chapter 5 brings Pollock and Motherwell together to explore further the intersection of artistic subjectivity with global concerns and elucidate what one artist subject termed the “humanly meaningful” goals of abstraction. The book is divided into two thematic sections with somewhat differently focused, but interrelated, arguments. Chapters 1 and 2, on Noguchi and Guston, track their social and political sympathies developing in the context of Depression-era left-wing radical thought. For them, working in Mexico in the mid-1930s allowed the communication of sympathies for the downtrodden too extremist up north. Even temporary displacement would have a profound longterm stimulus effect on each. In Chapters 3 to 5 a more comprehensive argument is formulated and its consequences played out through specific examples, not all made in Mexico. Here emphasis is placed on the Mexican-related iconographic and technical experiments of Pollock in New York and, especially, the formation of Motherwell’s style and aesthetic within the crucible of the Surrealists’ various expatriate circles. For Motherwell, working closely with Matta and Paalen in Mexico provided an impetus to explore “the question of identity as a moral problem,” and, concurrently, to develop a more internationalist outlook. The impact of Motherwell’s encounters with notable cultural figures, including, among others, Breton, Meyer Schapiro, Lionel Abel, and Kurt Seligmann, played a decisive role in his ability to maximize crossborder interchange.

Chapter 1 explicates Noguchi’s case, uncovering explicit links between the unusually strident cement relief he sculpted for Mexico City’s publicly funded Mercado Abelardo L. Rodríguez and the contemporaneous radicalization in New York of avant-garde dance. Noguchi’s extraordinary series of stage sets for Martha Graham’s company was initiated immediately prior to his beginning this Mexican work; these have been mostly studied by dance historians who are somewhat less interested in formulating connections with his sculptural oeuvre. Authors discussing History as Seen from Mexico, 1936 typically note its embedded Marxist symbolism, but none explore the obvious traces in it of Noguchi’s identification with the agenda of activist dance, or establish how his Mercado mural encapsulates many of the premises underpinning his much-celebrated secondary career of designing for the stage. The great passion for Mexico that Graham and Noguchi shared needs to be considered in any evaluation of their collaboration. A principal aspect of the chapter on Noguchi involves parsing the sculptor’s obvious knowledge of the effectiveness of bodily metaphor to express polemical content.

An earlier version of Chapter 2, featuring Philip Guston, was published in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s scholarly journal American Art as “Double Consciousness in Mexico: How Philip Guston and Reuben Kadish Painted a Morelian Mural” (Spring 2007), winning the 2008 Patricia and Philip Frost Award. This chapter challenges the accepted notion that Guston and Kadish’s monumental 1934–35 epic The Struggle Against Terrorism, had no visible connection to its Mexican setting. I explain how the theme of this fresco (conceived and executed near a former Inquisition site in Michoácan that had, by the early thirties, been transformed into a hotbed of anticlericalism) was firmly rooted in local historical reality, and in a way that could intersect with the personal agenda of its young Jewish painters. Subsidiary sections of the Morelia composition, hardly ever discussed, are tied to the artists’ previous experience in Los Angeles when portable murals made to protest the fate of the Scottsboro Boys were destroyed by red-baiting police, and to Guston’s fixation with the Ku Klux Klan that came full circle in his influential late paintings.

Chapter 3 originated in arguments first proposed in an essay for a joint Pollock/Siquieros retrospective held in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1995, and subsequently refined as “Mexico and American Modernism: The Case of Jackson Pollock” in Abstract Expressionism: The International Context (Rutgers, 2007). This material has been additionally revised, including greatly expanded documentation. During the late 1930s, emulating Orozco’s powerful social vocabulary in accordance with his own private archetypes aided Pollock in redirecting his admiration for the heroics of Michelangelo into a more modernistic context. While Orozco’s compelling iconography helped point Pollock toward a complex psychological and artistic identification with Picasso, Siqueiros’s polemically based experimentation with materials suggested the more groundbreaking potential of a “subversive alternate arrangement.” The Mexican master’s example of machismo, more extreme than that of Pollock’s teacher Thomas Hart Benton, also played a central role in his psychic development.

Exposing a legacy of malefaction and intolerance from biblical times to the present, Guston and Kadish’s mid-1930s Morelia mural referenced by implication a confluence of insecurity, persecution, and ritual violence considered at that time a characteristic of Mexico, equally powerful to its great sensuousness and natural beauty. Such dramatically stark contrasts also appealed to filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein as well as to Mexico’s revolving-door contingent of displaced Surrealists in the early years of the following decade; the country’s émigré clique during the war (including, at various junctures, Paalen, Matta, Gordon Onslow-Ford, and Breton) attracted into its orbit Robert Motherwell, another virtual unknown. Chapters 4 and 5 address the impact of Motherwell’s half-year experience in Mexico in 1941, expressed upon his return home through Pancho Villa’s fetishization and conversion to stark abstraction of the country’s whitewashed walls and blinding sunlight, and eventually contributing to development of the artist’s signature series, Elegies to the Spanish Republic, begun in 1949. Just how thoroughly his evolution of art and theory was connected to the deep attraction that Motherwell confessed with the “continual presence of sudden death” and other singular aspects of Mexico that “seized” his imagination compels more detailed explanation. In Chapter 5, divining the extent and impact of Mexico’s aesthetic implications allows for new ways to read the embedded tropes critical to Motherwell and Pollock’s early successes at Peggy Guggenheim’s Manhattan gallery, Art of This Century. Dialogue with Mexican artistic accomplishment is exposed as a crucial spur to Abstract Expressionism’s move away from narrative without discarding the essence of allegorical intent. Prior assessments of Surrealism’s incorporation into New York School innovation have not adequately interpreted the active role that Mexico played in this process.

Up to now, the primary source for information about the Mexican impact on American mid-twentieth-century art has been South of the Border: Mexico in the American Imagination, 1914–1947. This comprehensive catalogue was published to accompany a 1993 traveling exhibition organized by the Yale University Art Gallery. South of the Border emphasized the folkloric and pictorialist aspects of the “enormous vogue of things Mexican” that reached its peak between the two world wars, and its curators ably surveyed interrelationships between more than sixty American and Mexican artists. Pollock, Motherwell, Noguchi, and Guston were all included, but — of necessity in such a large group — their ties to Mexico could only be sketched. In Mexico and American Modernism I redress this through a targeted set of correlated case studies and a concluding chapter that zeroes in on and fast-forwards the main protagonists into their modernist (and, in Guston’s case, postmodern) futures. Although approaching Mexican accomplishment through the eyes of four U.S. artists intensely stimulated by it, my aim is not to present one side as “significant” and one as “other.” As the final quotation by Octavio Paz implies, a more discursive framework is suggested for a fuller exploration of the complex and intriguing ramifications of this fascinating instance of bi-national cross-fertilization.

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